Entrepreneurial Geekiness

We’re having the 3rd in our intermittent series of Brighton Python meetups, next week we join 40+ local geek freelancers of Brighton Farm to help them celebrate their 6th anniversary.

Please come along on Wednesday 18th Feb at the Farm Tavern for Python discussion, celebrating our new mail list and the odd beer or three.  On the table we’ll have the recent Expert Python Programming.

From Brighton station you need to travel part-way into Hove, the busses along Western Road will all take you in the right direction, get off by Palmeira Square and go back a couple of side-streets and you’ll find Farm Road heading North, the Farm Tavern is the second pub up the street.

John and I will be there, along with others on the mailing list.

Before Christmas I was asked if I’d like to review Packt’s new Expert Python Programming (at Packt).

I’ve always recommended Beginning Python – From Novice to Professional to Python first-timers (new 2nd ed) along with Python in a Nutshell for those who want a thorough reference guide.

I sat on the review for a while as at first I figured the book was a bit light on interesting material.  My mistake – upon proper investigation I realised there’s quite a lot in there, I’ll definitely be using the book in the future.

Here’s a summary by Chapter:

1. Installing Python and iPython, not much here if you’re comfy installing Python
2. Lower-level code basics including list comprehensions, iterators and decorators
3. Subclassing and use of ‘super’
4. Naming – a very important topic!  This is something I pick-up on in my ShowMeDo videos with Pep 008, getting new developers to name consistently and sensibly is very important.  Includes a short description of building eggs, deprecating code, pyLint and CloneDigger (a useful-looking tool to find repeated code segments that could be refactored)
5. Using DistUtils and SetupTools to creates eggs and upload them to the PyPI (CheeseShop of old). I’ve never done this and this guide looks useful
6. Building a new application using virtualenv.  This focuses on setting up a package to aggregate RSS feeds with feedparser and SQLAlchemy
7. Distributing the entire app using zc.buildout using a self-contained directory structure
8. Version control, focuses on the distributed version control tool Mercurial and the continuous integration tool BuildBot
9. Project Lifecycle – covers Waterfall and Agile techniques, I thought this was a very light chapter.
10. Documentation – how to document for others to read, writing using reSructuredText
11. Test Driven Development – a very important chapter for any longer-running project, covers unittest, doctest and nose
12. Optimisation introduction – profiling speed, memory usage (Guppy-PE) and network usage – a good intro if this is new to you
13. Optimisation techniques – focuses on using more efficient collections, multi-processing with pyProcessing and caching
14. Design Patterns – a simple overview of some of the more obvious patterns

Do I recommend the book?  I think if the above topics are new to you then you’d benefit from the book.  My main criticism is that the chapters aren’t very deep, sometimes the topics provide little more than an intro to further on-line research.  That said, if the topics are new then the advice generally seems helpful.

A nit pick is that the editorial control needs improvement, I came across typos and odd grammar.  Maybe I’m spoiled by O’Reilly books where you rarely find typos.

For anyone coming to the Brighton Python usergroup on Feb 18th (google group) I’ll bring along my copy.

Here’s a free chapter and a set of other reviews.